Tuesday, December 12, 2017

Ian Morrison’s review of the tax measures designed to stem
the flow of advertising dollars to U.S.
media was conveniently incomplete. Section 19 of the Income Tax Act disallowed as
a deductible business expense the cost of advertising in foreign-owned publications to
protect magazines in the 1960s because U.S.
titles like Time were publishing Canadian editions. Bill C-58 similarly shielded
television in 1976 because American stations close to the border were selling
ads in Canada. That
set off a trade dispute in which the U.S.
disallowed as a business expense the cost of attending conventions in Canada.
More than 100 were cancelled the following year as a result. A ceasefire in this cross-border
business war was only negotiated with the 1988 Free Trade Agreement. This might
prove a cautionary tale about the perils of scheming to redistribute
cross-border commerce, especially in the current era of “America First.”

Tuesday, November 28, 2017

Postmedia Network’s recent trade with Torstar of 41 community
newspapers – with 36 of themreportedly to be closed,throwing 290 out of work – has prompted much Eastern media outrage. That’s
because it went down in Ontario,
which is the centre of the Canadian media universe. The same sorts of community
newspaper trades and closures have been going on for years in BC almost
unnoticed nationally, resulting in dozens of lucrative local monopolies for Black Press and Glacier Media.

Postmedia’s observation that its trade with Torstar is “not subject to the merger notification provisions of the Competition Act and no regulatory clearance is required to
close the transaction” points up the weakness in federal oversight of media
takeovers, which is practically nil. But since when is such brazenly
anti-competitive behaviour not subject to regulatory review? Maybe not in
advance, but surely it can be reviewed. Buying and then closing your
competition used to be illegal. Postmedia, which is 98 percent owned by U.S.
hedge funds, may have finally overplayed its hand in exploiting Canadian
regulatory laxity and then bragging about it.

And while they aren’t as lucrative as they used to be,
Postmedia and Torstar’s community newspaper arm Metroland Media Group are
hardly losing money. MMG recorded earningsbefore
interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) for the first nine
months of 2017 of $21.3 million on revenues of $272 million, for a profit
margin of 7.8 percent. Postmedia had operating earningsfor its fiscal year ended August 31 of $12.35 million on revenues of $178.8
million, for a profit margin of 6.9 percent. The earnings of both companies
have undeniably fallen recently in step with plunging print advertising revenues,
however, and both companies have been forced to take drastic measures to boost
their bottom lines. Monopoly is indisputably more profitable than competition,
but will such anti-competitive measures – which greatly diminish local news
provisions, to the great detriment of democracy – finally push Ottawa
too far?

The closures and layoffs point up the urgent need for media
ownership reform in Canada.
Changes to the Competition Act to review mergers and takeovers of media outlets
on non-economic grounds were called for by a 2006 Senate report on news media.
That call was renewed in June by a Parliamentary committee on media and local
communities chaired by Vancouver Centre MP Hedy Fry, which held hearings for 16
months and issued a report urging measures to ease the ongoing crisis in
Canadian journalism. Those also included boosting digital media, which are
struggling to fill the growing gap in news coverage, by making charitable donations
to non-profit news media tax deductible, as they are under Section 501(c)(3) of
the U.S. tax code. This has buoyed investigative journalism south of the border
by startups such as Pro Publica and the online-only Texas Tribune, along with
increased local news coverage by websites like MinnPost and Voice of San Diego.

Instead of these measures, however, news coverage of the Fry
committee report focused on a “Netflix tax” it supposedly recommended to help
boost Canadian journalism, which Prime Minister Justin Trudeau immediately
distanced himself from under questioning by reporters. The report recommended nothing of the kind,however. It instead suggested extending the 5 percent levy on cable and
satellite TV revenues, which helps to fund Canadian content, to the rich
profits the monopoly cablecos rake in on internet service provision. They make
about a 45 percent return on those revenues, which has helped them to quietly buy
up all of the major private TV networks in Canada
over the past decade. (Bell owns CTV,
Rogers owns the City network, and
Shaw owns the Global Television Network.)

Public perceptions were also not aided by the almost
immediate bid by the newspaper industry for a bailout of $275 million a year,
which Heritage Minister Mélanie Joly slapped down in September. Lost in these
kerfuffles, however, have been the Fry committee’s suggestions for both slowing
media ownership consolidation and fostering Canadian digital journalism.
Changes to the Competition Act to better deal with media mergers are long
overdue, having been called for by two federal inquiries going back more than a
decade. And if the Liberal government wants to help grow digital media in Canada,
leveling the playing field with U.S.
media by helping to fund non-profit startups with charitable donations should
be another priority.

If nothing is done soon, the Fry report will almost
certainly join its predecessors in history’s dustbin. In addition to the 2006
Senate report on news media, those also include the 1970 Senate report on mass
media that proposed review of media mergers and takeovers, the 1981 report of
the Royal Commission on Newspapers that called for limits on chain ownership of
newspapers, and the 2003 Lincoln parliamentary report on broadcasting policy that
questioned convergence, which proceeded to decimate Canadian media.Had the warnings of any of these inquiries been heeded, we likely wouldn’t
be in the media mess we face today. This is likely our last best chance to
finally act on media ownership reform.

Sunday, October 15, 2017

A poorly edited version of the following was published on the
website of Policy
Options. Note how my meaning was changed at the end of the first paragraph. This passage was altered post-publication without my knowledge after the apparent intervention of Edward Greenspon. I have protested the inaccuracy of her rewrite to the editor, who has refused to change it.

Edward Greenspon isn’t giving up on a bailout for Canadian
newspapers. “It is a good thing more thinking time has been allowed around the
policy framework,” he wrote in response to Ottawa’s
recent rejection of a proposal for giving $275 million in annual assistance to
the country’s troubled dailies. (Unfinished business for Canadian journalism,
Policy Options, Oct. 2) Greenspon somehow sees in background documents filed with the policy pronouncement a door left open just a crack
for the ailing newspaper business. That means more work for his think tank, the
Public Policy Forum, which has been pushing a bailout since Hedy Fry’s
committee on Media and Local Communities released its report calling for
government action in June.

Greenspon laid the groundwork for a bailout in the PPF’s
report The Shattered Mirror, which was released in February late January and paid for
mostly by the Heritage Ministry, with a half dozen major corporations also
contributing. It so exaggerated the plight of newspapers, however, that it
brought howls of derision from Canadian media economists, myself included. He quickly
switched hats and began officially working on a bailout in conjunction with
News Media Canada, an industry group formed by the recent merger of the
Canadian Newspaper Association and the Canadian Community Newspaper Association.
Community newspapers already get assistance, as do magazines, from the Canadian
Periodical Fund, which doles out $75 million annually.

Greenspon’s proposal was simple, but expensive – extend CPF
assistance to dailies and boost the fund by $275 million a year. That fell flat
with the federal government, no doubt due in part to the fact that Postmedia
Network, by far the country’s largest newspaper chain, is 98 percent owned by U.S.
hedge funds. They are bleeding it dry by siphoning off most of Postmedia’s
annual earnings as payments on the company’s massive debt, the majority of
which the hedge funds also hold. This arrangement was allowed to stand by the
Harper government despite a supposed limit of 25 percent on foreign ownership in
this culturally sensitive industry. It then looked the other way in 2014 as
Postmedia took over Sun Media, the country’s second-largest chain, which gave
it 21 of the 25 largest Canadian dailies, including eight of the nine largest
in the three westernmost provinces. Soon after that deal got Competition Bureau
approval, and despite promises not to, Postmedia merged the newsrooms of
duplicate dailies it thus owned in Vancouver,
Calgary, Edmonton,
and Ottawa. It shamelessly pushed
the Conservatives for re-election in 2015, ordering its editors to endorse
Harper and running full-page, front page ads warning that voting Liberal or NDP
would “cost” Canadians. It even spiked an election day column by the National
Post’s Andrew Coyne because it endorsed a party other than the Conservatives.
Then it turns around and sticks its hand out to the newly-elected Liberal
government, asking for a bailout? Puh-lease.

Heritage Minister Melanie Joly made the right decision but
for the wrong reason in her nixing of assistance for Canada’s
dailies. “Our approach will not be to bail out industry models that are no
longer viable,” she said in setting out her vision for the government’s
relationship with Canadian media. “Rather, we will focus our efforts on
supporting innovation, experimentation and transition to digital.” Ironically, and
contrary to widespread misconception, newspapers remain viable, as I chronicled
in my 2014 book Greatly Exaggerated: The Myth of the Death of Newspapers (Vancouver:
New Star Books). Despite an historic downturn in advertising revenues as a
result of the Great Recession and a sharp pivot to cheaper digital advertising,
no publicly-traded newspaper company in the U.S. or Canada (ie. the ones for
which earnings reports are available) lost money on an operating basis between
2006 and 2013. Postmedia made $82 million in its most recent fiscal year, but $72
million of that went on debt payments to the hedge funds. The result has been
massive cuts to news coverage, which fledgling digital media have been unable to
make up for because few, notably subscription-based outlets such as
allnovascotia.com, have figured out how to make money online.

Greenspon, whose Shattered Mirror report was largely silent
on the sticking points of ownership concentration and foreign ownership,
protests that denying daily newspapers a spot at the media trough is wrong. “Excluding
the major originators of the country’s news, including local news, from a
scheme based on original editorial content would make no sense.” He has a new
idea, however, which smacks of a Hail Mary pass on behalf of Canada’s
dailies whose bailout ambitions he is quarterbacking. But it’s not that crazy
an idea. If the government is queasy about bailing out foreign hedge funds, he
writes, “there would be less static if, as part of a future support package,
these enterprises agreed to become (officially) nonprofits.” The notion of
converting legacy media to non-profit status has been bruited by some, such as French economist Julia Cagé, in order to free them from the money-making
imperative that has run them into the ground. “In the case of newspaper chains,”
writes Greenspon, “each individual newspaper could be sold to owners based in
the local communities.”

Now we’re talking. Instead of cutting back on
journalism to feed their owning vulture funds, the country’s largest dailies
would be legally obligated to reinvest any profits in reporting. The advantage
to the government would be that the money to pay the vultures to flock off
would come not from the public purse but instead from new, hopefully more
civic-minded local owners. The only remaining matter would seem to be price.
How much would it cost us to pay off the hedge funds and be rid of their malign
neglect? The devil, as always, will be in the details.

No sooner had Liberal MP Hedy
Fry’s parliamentary heritage committee handed down its report on Canada’s
news media crisis in June (after 16 months of hearings in Ottawa)
than the newspaper industry bellied up to the trough and put in for a bailout worth
$275 million a year. The timing was poor, as it appeared the other shoe had dropped
a bit too quickly.

When it comes to money grabs, however,
the press proved bumbling amateurs compared with Canada’s
electronic media.

Titled Disruption: Change
and Churning in Canada’s
Media Landscape, the Fry report made many sensible recommendations. Some are
long overdue, like changes to our charitable giving laws that would allow tax-deductible
donations to fund journalism, as they can in the U.S.
and elsewhere. Other recommendations repeat pleas made by previous inquiries, such
as for a diversity test to prevent market dominance by any media owner, and changes
to the Competition Act that would treat news media takeovers differently than
those in other industries. The same measures were suggested in 2006 by a Senate
committee on news media, but they were ignored by a newly installed Harper
government that looked the other way for a decade as the country’s media instead
consolidated into unprecedented power centres.

Internet Service Provision (ISP) profit margins, 2012-15

Our largest newspaper chain
(Postmedia) was taken over on Harper’s watch by U.S. hedge funds, which now own
98% of the company—despite a supposed 25% limit on foreign ownership in this
culturally sensitive industry. Postmedia in turn took over Sun Media, our
second-largest newspaper chain, giving it 15 of the country’s 21 largest
dailies, including eight of the nine largest in Western Canada.

CEO Paul Godfrey promised to
preserve competition in cities where Postmedia thus owned both dailies and the
Competition Bureau signed off on the deal in 2015. The double-cross came last
year, when Postmedia merged the newsrooms of its duplicate dailies in Vancouver,
Edmonton, Calgary
and Ottawa, prompting Fry’s
inquiry. (See “Can Canada’s Media Be Fixed?” in the July-August 2016 Monitor.)

The Fry report left vague any
process for subsidizing news media in its first of 20 recommendations, urging
only that the heritage minister “explore the existing structures to create a
new funding model that is platform agnostic and would support Canadian
journalistic content.” Within hours, however, the newspaper industry weighed in
with a detailed—and self-serving—proposal that was hardly agnostic with respect
to platforms.

The industry suggested the
Canadian Periodical Fund, which currently subsidizes magazines and non-daily
newspapers to the tune of $75 million a year, offered a suitable model. News
Media Canada,
an industry group created by a recent merger between Newspapers Canada and the
Canadian Community Newspaper Association, proposed extending the CPF to daily
newspapers. It asked the government to simply underwrite 35% of their editorial
expenses, but to not give such assistance to regulated broadcasters, who
already benefit from the CRTC’s largesse, or to digital media like upstart blogs.

“No one wants to fund personal
rants or political agendas,” argued Bob Cox, publisher of the independent Winnipeg
Free Press, who heads News Media Canada (despite Postmedia’s dominance of
the industry). Connecting the dots in all of this, we find some unsettling
connections.

A draft of News Media Canada’s proposal that was circulated
to groups for endorsement came on letterhead of the Public Policy Forum, but
the final version made no mention of involvement by the think-tank. Headed by
former Globe and Mail editor Edward Greenspon, the PPF was paid $200,000 by the
Heritage ministry in 2016 to research Canada’s
media malaise.

Greenspon’s report The Shattered Mirror, handed down early this year, took up with vigour the
newspaper industry’s escalating beef against Facebook and Google, which circulate
news online and dominate the digital ad market. But it so exaggerated the
plight of newspapers and the threat of the foreign internet giants that
Carleton University media economist Dwayne Winseck accused Greenspon and his scholarly
research team of “goosing the numbers” to make their overstated case. The PPF’s
media projects may have been separate and unconnected, but the optics are nonetheless
poor.

The Harper decade also saw the
consolidation of even more worrying power centres in Canada’s
electronic media. The Fry report’s most contentious suggestion was for where
the money to fund flagging Canadian journalism should come from, and the
country’s media seemingly circled the wagons on this one.

The report proposed a levy on internet
service providers (ISPs), which was immediately framed as a “Netflix tax” by some
journalists. Reporters who had received leaked copies of the Fry report grilled
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on the proposal almost before the ink was dry. He
disowned any such idea, saying “we’re not raising taxes on the middle class.”

What the report really suggested,
however, was extending to internet service provision the 5% levy that cablecos
already pay on their television revenues to fund Canadian broadcast content. It
makes sense, after all, that those who are cashing in fastest on the digital
revolution should help fix the mess the internet has made of media.

The CRTC’s latest Communications Monitoring Report shows the cabelcos make profit margins on their unregulated ISP
rates in the range of 45%. So rich have they grown, first through lucrative
cable TV monopolies, then with broadband internet access, that they have all bought
TV networks. (CTV is owned by Bell,
Global by Shaw, and CITY by Rogers.)
That gives the vertically integrated content/carrier TV giants tremendous power
over national perceptions.

If they say Fry is angling for
a new tax on Netflix-watching Canadians, who will believe her report in fact urged
a levy to claw back excess profits from the corpulent cabelcos?

Saturday, March 18, 2017

Your article “The Canadian Newspaper Industry is Getting a New Jolt of Life” (March 6) was well written by H.G. Watson, but its presentation on your
pages was misleading in several ways, starting with the headline. After
reciting the litany of woes that have beset the industry over the past decade or so, Ms. Watson mentioned a few digital initiatives that are attempting to help
fill the growing news gap in Canada.
These hardly qualify as the “jolt of life” somehow seen by your headline
writer. The accompanying graphic was even more misleading, claiming that 171
local news outlets have closed in Canada
since 2008. This does not jibe with data gathered scrupulously by Newspapers
Canada, which actually show an increase over the past five years. It does, however, fit in well with the rampant myth-making I found in
researching my 2014 book Greatly Exaggerated: The Myth of the Death of Newspapers. (PDF | reviews)

As mentioned in your article, the Canadian newspaper industry
suffered less severely during the Great Recession than in the U.S.
That was because the economy north of the border did not decline as steeply due to more
sensible banking regulations. Only one daily was
closed, but
it was immediately reincarnated as a local version of the free
commuter tabloid Metro. By my count, eight daily newspapers have been closed in
Canada since 2010
(seven others have moved to non-daily publication), but the vast majority of
the closures have occurred under questionable circumstances that warrant
federal investigation. The largest newspaper closed was the Guelph Mercury, which
ranked about 50th in circulation among Canada’s
then 90-odd paid dailies. The others were among Canada’s
smallest. Six were closed and three were rendered non-dailies by
two chains in the far western province
of British Columbia that have been buying, selling, and even trading newspapers back and forth since 2010, then often closing them to eliminate competition. By my
count, Black Press and Glacier Media have closed 19 of the newspapers they have
exchanged, including non-dailies. More than half of the 15 newspapers the
chains traded in one 2014 deal were subsequently shuttered, creating numerous local monopolies. The federal Competition Bureau seems not to have noticed. The chains have claimed that some of the closed
titles were unprofitable, but financial statements filed by Glacier Media,
which is publicly traded, show that it recorded a profit margin for the first
nine months of 2016 in excess of 30 percent. Black Press is privately owned and is thus not required to disclose its
finances, but it is partly owned by publicly-traded Torstar Corp., whose annual
reports show that between 2011 and 2015 Black Press recorded earnings ranging from $15 million to $28 million, peaking in 2013. As for non-daily
newspapers, according to Newspapers Canada data,
there were 1,060 in Canada
last year, or 18 more than in 2011.

As I show in Greatly Exaggerated, no publicly-traded
newspaper company in North America suffered an annual loss on an operating
basis between 2006 and 2013, a period which included the greatest-ever decline
in newspaper advertising revenues, a stupefying drop of about half in the U.S.
and a quarter in Canada. Most newspaper companies emerged from the recession
making double-digit profit margins. Some barely dipped below 20 percent return
on revenue. Even the dozen or so chains that declared bankruptcy during
this period were profitable, some enviably so. Their problem was the enormous
debt they had taken on in making acquisitions, which could not be serviced with
their reduced revenues. Their newspapers were profitable. The debt-laden chains
were not.

Hayley Watson poignantly asks in her article “What the hell
happened to the Canadian newspaper industry?” The answer is simple – unhindered
corporate financial engineering and inexcusable federal regulatory failure. My
2016 book The News We Deserve: The Transformation of Canada’s Media Landscape (PDF | reviews), chronicles how Canada’s largest
newspaper company, Canwest Publications, was taken over following its 2009
bankruptcy by U.S. hedge funds despite a supposed limit on foreign ownership of
25 percent. The hedge funds bought up a large portion of Canwest’s massive debt
at pennies on the dollar, then used part of it in making a so-called “credit
bid” that won the company at auction. The real stroke of financial engineering
genius came when the hedge funds kept the rest of this high-interest debt on
the company’s books, meaning that the renamed Postmedia Network had to pay them
first every month. As a result, of the $82 million in operating earnings
Postmedia recorded in its most recent fiscal year (on revenues of $877 million, for a profit margin of 9.3 percent), it was
forced to make $72 million in payments on debt bizarrely held mostly by its foreign
owners. The result has been non-stop cost cutting to service this debt as
Postmedia revenues fall.

But wait, it gets worse. The hedge funds doubled down in
2014, buying 175 of the 178 dailies owned by Canada’s
second-largest newspaper chain, Sun Media. That gave it both dailies in three
more cities – Ottawa, Calgary
and Edmonton – in addition to Vancouver,
where it already owned both. It promised it wouldn’t merge the newsrooms in
those cities and the acquisition was approved by the Competition Bureau. By my count, that gave Postmedia 37.6 percent
of paid daily circulation nationwide, and 75.4 percent in the three westernmost
provinces, where it owns eight of the nine largest dailies. Despite its
promises, in early 2016 Postmedia merged the newsrooms of its dual dailies in
Ottawa, Edmonton, Calgary, and even Vancouver, where its corporate progenitor promised the Competition Bureau’s predecessor more than a half century ago
that would never happen.

That’s when I decided to try and do something about this
instead of simply researching and writing about it, as I have for the past 20
years. I presented some of the above facts to Dr. Hedy Fry, who is the
longest-serving Member of Parliament in the federal Liberal government that was
elected in late 2015 following almost a decade of Conservative rule. Hearings
were convened in Ottawa by a Heritage ministry committee on Media and Local Communities several
weeks later and have been ongoing for more than a year. A report by a think tank was commissioned, but it ignored the problems of ownership concentration and foreign ownership, instead laying most of the blame for Canada's local news disaster on the U.S. online giants Facebook and Google, which it suggested taxing to subsidize shrinking news outlets. It similarly promoted the newspaper death myth and was accused of "goosing the numbers" in doing so. The committee's recommendations to alleviate the ever-worsening journalism crisis
in Canada are expected by spring.

A real jolt of life is badly needed for Canada’s
decimated news media. It will hopefully come soon. In the meantime, can we please stick to the facts about what is undeniably a crisis and paint a picture that better conforms to reality?

Friday, February 10, 2017

Criticism is piling up of the Public Policy Forum’s
controversial new report, The Shattered Mirror. The
first round was of the knee jerk variety, which is what the daily press
specializes in. A second round of analysis is now under way by academics, who
are by nature more contemplative and less reactive. I was a bit hard on the
report, which was authored by former Globe and Mail editor Edward Greenspon, in
an entry posted earlier this week on my old blog, Greatly Exaggerated, calling it “more like a funhouse mirror.”
My 2014 book Greatly Exaggerated: The Myth of the Death of Newspapers
produced reams of data to show that newspapers in Canada and the U.S. were
still making healthy profit margins. (They still are.) The Shattered Mirror nonetheless
goes to great lengths to perpetuate the myth that newspapers are “bleeding red
ink.” (As do others.)

My new book, The News We Deserve: The Transformation of Canada’s Media
Landscape, to which this blog is dedicated, looks at exactly what has brought our news
media to near banana republic status. I mainly blame our absurdly high levels of
media ownership concentration, which the federal Competition Bureau has failed
to halt or even challenge, and majority ownership of Canada’s
largest newspaper company by U.S.
hedge funds in contravention of our foreign ownership limits, which the
erstwhile Harper government chose not to enforce. The Greenspon report dismisses
concentration as a problem, fails to even mention foreign ownership, and gives
the Competition Bureau a pass.

Now Carleton University media economist Dwayne Winseck has
weighed in with a scathing but lengthy analysis on his blog Mediamorphis,
calling the report “badly flawed” because it “cherry-picks evidence and gooses
the numbers” to make its case. This, of course, is what think tanks like the
Fraser Institute do – start with predetermined policy conclusions and muster enough
evidence to support them while ignoring evidence that doesn’t. Chief among The Shattered
Mirror’s crimes, according to Winseck, is exaggerating the online bogeyman.

There is . . . an acute sense of threat inflation that hangs
about it. The extent to which Google, Facebook, Silicon Valley and “the
Internet” are made the villains of the piece is both symptomatic of how the
report tries to harness such threats to preordained policy ends and a framing
that undermines the report’s credibility.

Not only does The Shattered Mirror dodge the issue of media ownership
concentration, notes Winseck, it also overlooks the impact of the 2008-09 financial
crisis, which brought a sharp drop in advertising from which our news media have
yet to recover “and likely won’t.” Besides, he adds, “advertising is no longer
the centre of the media economy, and [is] receding ever further from that role
by the day, so hinging a policy rescue on recovering so-called lost advertising
is out of step with reality and likely to fail.”

As the bottom on advertising revenue falls out that source
of subsidy will have to be replaced by another if we really are concerned about
getting the news we deserve – trying to wrestle money out of Google and
Facebook (the report’s central policy proposal) won’t cut it.

Winseck, who closely tracks media industries through his Canadian
Media Concentration Research Project, is critical of the PPF report’s focus on the “fake news” fad and finds it generally alarmist. “The language
about ‘vampire economics’ is overwrought,” writes Winseck. “Such things give a
tinge of moral panic to the report, and taints the analysis and policy
proposals.” Data presented in the report to paint old media as declining and
even failing is highly misleading, according to Winseck. “Its fixation on
advertising revenue, for instance, assumes that it has always been an integral
part of the natural journalistic order of things. It has not.” A drop in
conventional television revenues noted in the report is “misleading,” according
to Winseck, in light of the lush profits being raked in by the broadcasting
behemoths overall, such as Bell’s “eye-popping” 40 percent return on revenue.

Bell is the biggest,
vertically-integrated TV operator in Canada
by far, accounting for roughly 30% of all TV revenues and 28% of total
revenue across the network media economy. Ignoring conditions at a company with
this clout across the media economy is negligent, but also part of a tendency
in this report to selectively invoke a small part of the picture to fill in a
portrait of catastrophe of a larger kind. . . . The report is chock-a-block
full of such examples, which lends to the impression that the report’s authors
are goosing the numbers.

Likewise the report’s claims about collapsing newspaper
circulation and journalism job losses. Its claim that between 12,000 and
14,000 journalism jobs have been lost since the 1990s relies on headlines and
union data that “do a great job chronicling jobs lost but a poor one at keeping
track of those gained.” Statistics Canada
data “depicts a wholly different picture,” showing that the number of full-time
journalists in Canada
actually increased from 10,000 in 1987 to 11,631 in 2015. “Once again
consistent with a pattern, the authors ignore this data completely.” My take on
this is that there is no doubt mainstream media have suffered massive job
losses due to cutbacks brought by plunging revenues, but digital media have
proliferated, albeit with less well-paying and secure positions. And who knows
how many of those new “journalists” actually pump out sponsored content a/k/a
native advertising that is designed to look like news but is actually paid for by advertisers.

Circulation trends for daily newspapers, according to
Winseck’s data going back to 1971, are similarly “not the catastrophe that The
Shattered Mirror makes them out to be.” He has the same problem I have with the
plummeting graph of newspaper sales per household (left), which the PPF report predicts
will fall from 18 in 2015 to only two by 2025. “By this measure, the
relentless decline and seemingly inevitable outcome look really, really bad –
catastrophic even,” writes Winseck. But sales per household are increasingly
less relevant as the number of households soars because people are increasingly
choosing to live alone. Winseck performs an extensive analysis of historical
newspaper circulation data to show that the Public Policy Forum has grossly
exaggerated the decline of newspapers. The report, according to Winseck, “has
selectively chosen a measure that paints the worst-case
scenario.” This type of intellectual dishonesty might be common practice in the
world of journalism from which Greenspon comes, but it won’t get past a
scrupulous scholar like Winseck. My own research has found that newspapers have
deliberately cut back on circulation in order to save on expenses because they
actually lose money on every copy they sell.